Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on September 1, 2013 by Jazz Shaw

The state of the union is not good. Organized labor has been “reduced to a whisper of its former greatness,” admits author Phillip Dray. “No one can divine or guarantee its future,” he adds, “but we can know its past.” And what an inspiring, doleful, and switchbacking past that is. Dray’s wonderful “There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America” (Anchor, 2011) pans back to explain the original sin that made America less receptive than other Western countries to unions; we were a capitalist power before we had a countervailing strong central government. The deck was stacked for business here, but things played out quite differently in older First World nations. Note the modern results: in Sweden, 67.5 percent of workers are unionized, in Belgium 50.4 percent, and in Ireland 31.2 percent.

In the United States, we live in an especially anti-union climate now, partly because we’ve shot from a factory economy to a finance and service economy, partly because (as Dray admits) labor has sometimes been “its own worst enemy.” Many unions were historically harsh to minorities and women, for instance, or sank into appalling corruption (see Hoffa, Jimmy). But Dray asks us to strip down to fundamentals: In a country founded on the concept of checks and balances, surely unions make inherent sense. Who else can stand up to The Man?

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Almost 120 years later, unions are in the middle of a steep decline. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the total number of union members fell to 14.3 million, or 11.3 percent of U.S. workers — the lowest level since 1916. It isn’t hard to see why: On one side, an increasing number of states have enacted right-to-work laws and have placed restrictions on collective bargaining. At the same time, a growing number of employers across the business spectrum have actively fought union formation. Even Northeastern University hired a union-busting law firm to deal with faculty members who were attempting to collectively bargain…

However, unions also bear some of the blame for their decline. In the face of an anti-union PR blitz that has tagged them with a host of shortcomings, their response has been weak and, at times, tin-eared. Their biggest ad push of recent years was based around a commercial titled “Work Connects Us All,” which pointed out the value of jobs, but failed to show how jobs were connected to unions.

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Labor Day is about celebrating workers, not union bosses. But as union bosses rush for face time to show they “stand with workers,” what is often forgotten on Labor Day is why 93 percent of private-sector workers have chosen not to stand with a union — bringing union membership to a historical low.

Perhaps the reason why more workers are refusing to affiliate with a union now than any other time in almost a century is because union boss political activism takes precedence over protecting worker rights.

Even as private-sector voluntary union membership continues to steadily decline, an analysis published by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research last week found that union officials spent a whopping $1.7 billion on politicking and lobbying during the last election cycle.

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The public sector remains heavily organized, with 36% union membership, but government payrolls have generally been shrinking as a share of overall employment. And public-sector unions are now under pressure around the country, including in labor strongholds like Detroit.

Meanwhile, unions have had little luck breaking into new, faster-growing sectors. Just 12% of private-sector education workers and 7% of healthcare workers are union members, both broadly unchanged over the past decade. As for the new push into fast food, it faces an uphill climb: Just 1.2% of food-service workers were unionized in 2012.

Nor are demographics in unions’ favor. Just 4.2% of workers under 25 are unionized, compared to nearly 15% of those nearing retirement. Hispanics and Asians, the two fastest-growing U.S. ethnic groups, are less likely to be union members than the overall population.

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Leaders from major labor unions like the Teamsters, UCFW and UNITE-HERE are already livid with the Obama administration over Obamacare and now, unions representing pilots and flight attendants are ripping the Department of Justice for blocking the merger between U.S. Airways and American Airlines.

Just last week, AFL-CIO Nevada passed a resolution to openly criticize the Obama administration over its failure to fix problems with Obamacare which they say will kill the 40 hour work week and eliminate healthcare coverage for workers. It’s time for Republicans to start making some friends in labor on the topics of Obamacare and DOJ overreach.

This celebration has puzzled me for quite some time now. Why are we celebrating organizations that not only had virtually nothing to do with the improvement of society, but actually made it worse? To me, celebrating “labor” sounds more like a celebration of misery, as portrayed in the plays in Ayn Rand’s Anthem.

What should be celebrated is not our hardships, but what alleviates them – not organizations that pretend to care about an illusive common good they don’t even improve, but individuals whose individual contributions help improve society as a whole. What should be celebrated is capitalism itself.

Yes, I dared to use the dirty “C” word, whose popularity is unjustifiably waning. I say unjustifiably because rampant propaganda accusing capitalism of economic crises is just plain wrong. I also say unjustifiably because blaming capitalism for wrongs it’s not even guilty of is biting the hand that feeds you.

While young people appear to be backing away from US unions, Latinos are embracing them. Union members of Hispanic descent grew by almost 21%, to 2 million members, from 2002 to 2012. Nurses and car wash workers in California and janitors and casino crew in other states have embraced unions, with a big bump in union membership in California last year.

Blacks are still more likely to be union members than other racial groups, but their numbers fell as state and local governments and school districts cut millions of jobs. The only other group with a gain in union membership was Asian Americans, with a 4% gain to 668,000 members in 2012.

Despite renewed activism—the fast food strikes keep growing, though some say they are doomed—the union movement is still not moving many 20-somethings. Even when a young person gets hired into a unionized workplace, they are less likely to sign up as members. According to BLS data, around 84% join and pay their union dues, compared to 90% or more of workers over 25.

How an organization that was a minority of the employees in this country even in it’s heyday thinks it can maintain popularity even while calling the rest (and the majority) of the working people in the country names like “scab” is the height of gall. Unions are and have been the most entitlement-minded segment of our society.

Three types of people benefit from unions:
1) the incompetent/unmotivated worker (who would otherwise be sh~tcanned)
2) the union boss (who exploits #1 and lives off the dues of the workers)
3) the democrats the unions vote for

If you’re not 1), 2), or 3) — there is zero benefit to being a member of a union.

So…unions worked long and hard to get the govt to force companies to submit to their demands.

Now that the govt has done so-with far too many regulations, etc., workers find they don’t need or want the unions anymore.

The more govt does for us, they less we will be allowed to do in the long run.

Unions could have been a bulwark against abuses by both corporations and govt, but their leaders traded away union power for govt perks, much like many were bought out by savvy business owners around the turn of the 20th century, and now find that they have lost power and support.

Hotair management/Three Monkeys of Oblivion is hereby advised to not read the following as it could just conceivably cause some much needed self-reflection.

Black mob violence is back in Minneapolis.

Some say it never stopped, and if you depend on the local newspaper for information, you might think it never started. But Minneapolis police recently issued a “crime alert” for the downtown area following a rash of mob robberies and assaults.

According to City Paper:

“What we’re seeing in this pattern is victims walking downtown by themselves on a sidewalk outside, and they’re approached by a group of three to five African American males,” MPD spokeswoman Cyndi Barrington told City Pages.

“The average age range of the [suspects] is late teens to early 20s. Victims are punched and pushed to the ground, and their phones and wallets are taken.”

Details of the latest robberies and assaults are sketchy. Many go unreported. As William Davis found out in June.

Davis is the 30-year old producer of the aggressively hip and liberal radio program called Morning Grind. His station bills itself as “The Progressive Voice of Minnesota.” In the several years of racial violence downtown, the station has aggressively ignored the black mob mayhem.

An hour before he was beat and kicked into the Intensive Care Unit, 20 black people assaulted an out-of-town couple at the exact same intersection. The Star-Tribune may be squeamish about reporting the race of the criminals, but City Pages is not:

“Melissa screamed as three separate youths came at Kirk, throwing punches. Kirk says he was able to dodge the blows. He remembers one of the assailants smiling while he threw punches, ‘like it was fun.’ As people on the street started to take notice of the attack, the mob dispersed, leaving Kirk one-on-one with a man he says was over 6 feet tall.

“I dodged several of his punches before he ran off,” Kirk said, adding that he himself didn’t punch anyone. “I believe that if it wasn’t for my wife’s screaming I would have been seriously injured.” Thankfully, he ended up with nothing more than a swollen neck. Melissa, a 33-year-old school teacher, was pushed, and one of the assailants burned her hand with a cigarette, she says.

“After the mob dispersed, Kirk and Melissa made their way back to the Marquette. There, they talked to a police officer about the incident.

The Star-Tribune has yet to run a story on the police alert identifying the suspects in the recent robberies and assaults as “African American.” After last year’s wave of racial violence downtown, Star-Tribune reporter Matt McKinney said the violence and mayhem were “random” and “no other real pattern emerges” and the “motivation for the attacks remains unclear.”

I remember reading in David Halberstam’s book “The Fifties,” that William J. Levitt, builder of Levittown, Pa., hated unions and refused to allow his workforce to be unionized, which he believed protected the “laziest and most unmotivated workers.” Instead, he paid his workers by the piece, so to speak — the more homes they built, painted, installed plumbing in, roofed, etc., the more money they would make, even as the work was what he considered monotonous.

I have a cousin who was a Teamster. He worked for Pepsi back in the day and they would go out on strike for two or more weeks every single time their contract ran out. That was usually every two or three years. They counted that as a paid vacation as the union would pay them strike wages if they did a minimum amount of hours on the picket line. IIRC that was about 20 hours a week and they would get their full normal weeks wages from the union coffers for those two or three weeks if they logged their picket time. They counted on that as a bonus “paid vacation” every time the contract expired. Two or three days in a week would fulfill their picket time and the rest was party time with pay.

I was union, boy and man, for almost 40 years. The last 30 years I worked for the “phone company” and in the beginning walked the line during all the job actions and wildcat strikes which made little sense even to a kid who didn’t mind taking the rest of the day off. The deal breaker for me was an eleven month strike which resulted in an “agency shop” and a dollar raise. Having seen my dues money siphoned off to pay for the election campaign of Jimmy Carter didn’t help. Then, the head of our local absconded with our credit union’s funds, never to be seen again. I could go on, but dinner’s ready.

Roger that. My father was a union man for all but the last 10 years of his career, and proud of it. But, in the ’80s he and other members of his local started running the numbers and realized that more and more of their dues were going to political contributions and lobbying, and less and less to efforts at dealing and negotiating with management, etc.

They also saw that more than 90% of the political money was being funneled to liberal Democrats across the board, which they saw as a huge blunder, as none of them ever considered themselves libs and were certainly low-tax, gun clinging, family value types.

So, after my dad led an effort to get the national union to stop the madness, and failed, he turned his sights on de-unionizing the company for which he worked. After his car was vandalized, his life and his family threatened, and he himself was attacked in the parking lot one night (and all he needed was a few stitches but his goon attackers were hospitalized for months, after being arrested), he won the vote 65-35, if I recall, and so bye bye union.

The company, which was struggling to make a profit before then, rewarded my father and his co-workers by increasing the pensions of all employees, current and future, after their 20th year, while keeping the wages and conditions the same.

They could do that because no longer would they be tied to the built in, long-term commitments to essentially co-fund the union bosses, which they saw as middlemen, and knowing that their workers would have a lot more take home pay without the union dues. A win-win.

So, he and I and the family will be celebrating tomorrow, as we have since, as Non-Union Labor Day.

My first construction job in New York City was for a former union sheetrocker who went private because he got tired of having to kiss the Shop Stewart’s derriere in order to get work.

His first private job was a renovation of an apartment building in the East Village. He ended up having to hire armed security because the union had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the building one night along with other assorted mayhem.

When I applied for the job, I had to wait in the lobby of a second building he was working on until he came down and I could speak with him. The crews were sitting around having lunch. I asked, innocently enough, “Is this a Union job?” because I didn’t want to be in the union.

Every last one of them stopped eating and looked up at me with menace in their eyes. One of them asked, “Are you LOOKING for a Union job?”

When I answered in the negative, they all relaxed and went back to eating. I later found out about the Molotov on their other job.

TXUS, glad your dad had the chance to “reason” with the union in person. 45-50 years ago, when I was just born or nearly so, goons threw a stick of dynamite against my parents bedroom wall at night. It landed on a soft pile of fresh topsoil my dad was using for gardening, which somehow put it out, and was discovered the next morning.

I’m still thankful for that miracle, and, having worked in both union and non shops as an aircraft painter (including down in Greenville, TX), I’d take a non-union shop any day, even for lower pay.

The Star-Tribune has yet to run a story on the police alert identifying the suspects in the recent robberies and assaults as “African American.” After last year’s wave of racial violence downtown, Star-Tribune reporter Matt McKinney said the violence and mayhem were “random” and “no other real pattern emerges” and the “motivation for the attacks remains unclear.”

Jeesh! Sounds like a hit. The only reason I think we avoided something like that is that my dad had a reputation inside the union, both nationally and locally, as someone not to mess with. They also knew of his special “work” during WWII and that he still had “friends” from back then.

Can’t imagine finding a stick of dynamite outside your window, though. Chances are, knowing the cowards inside these unions, they put it there just as a warning, as “We know where you live and the next one you won’t live long enough to find.”

The stories you tell show that the workers really are the heroes we should acclaim on Labor Day, and not the unions themselves, whose bosses have for the most part betrayed their members and defamed the concept of collective bargaining.

When I feel that way, KWR, it’s a good time to go to the target range. It’s uplifting, in a way, to hear the gun’s report, smell the powder, watch the targets, real or imagined, be torn to shreds, as the casings *cling* when they hit the floor. Just sayin’.

When I feel that way, KWR, it’s a good time to go to the target range. It’s uplifting, in a way, to hear the gun’s report, smell the powder, watch the targets, real or imagined, be torn to shreds, as the casings *cling* when they hit the floor. Just sayin’.

The stories you tell show that the workers really are the heroes we should acclaim on Labor Day, and not the unions themselves, whose bosses have for the most part betrayed their members and defamed the concept of collective bargaining.

AesopFan on September 1, 2013 at 9:55 PM

True dat, and the original purpose of Labor Day. It was to honor American workers from the beginning, for building this country and making it work, day in and day out, and had nothing to do with unions.

The unions, once they got legs, hijacked Labor Day and turned it into “Union Appreciation Day”, with the help of the liberal media and politicians.

But it always about the individual American workers before then, and a nod to Capitalism, which gave them the freedom and privilege to work.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but my one and only union job as a cashier in a grocery store while I was in art school left me with a permanent dislike for any labor union. About three months after I quit, the union local went on strike and in about another month, the store closed.